A blog covering all technical issues I come across in my life. Mostly that's bugs and fixes for Windows or Mac OS X. It also covers software development issues I come across my work as a software engineer. I rarely post a problem without a fix, so the main goal of this blog is really to solve problems, not just list them. If you are looking for support for my application Fetch Art, check out my Fetch Art specific blog.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Fetch Art 1.2 and iTunes 7

Today apple announced iTunes 7. I'm currently at work and cannot test it with Fetch Art (although I am downloading the new version, it's going slow, the servers must be busy.) However, they claim they've added an album art download feature which may make Fetch Art obsolete.

I'll have to do some testing to see how it works (and how well it works) to see if this will signal the end of development on Fetch Art which of course will break my heart.

UPDATE: I've completed testing with iTunes 7 on several PowerPC Macs and am happy to report Fetch Art runs great on all the machines I tested on. Still working towards Intel Mac support though.

I'd love to hear you comments as well. Let me know if you think the new feature of iTunes successfully replaces Fetch Art or if there are still reasons to continue developing the application.

Hi - I just tried Fetch Art with iTunes 7 - I got the same error as akseeker

Incidentally, iTunes 7 art download is dependent on having an iTunes store account - those countries that don't have an iTunes store (like us folks in New Zealand) simply can't use it - good reason to continue Fetch Art - call it aid for the underdeveloped world in the 21st century - like the Peace Corps used to do!

Fetch Art is still necessary. iTunes doesn't allow for running specified songs - its your entire library or nothing. And given how error prone all artwork grabbers can be - I really don't want to run it on my entire library. Please keep up the good work.

I had the same problem as akseeker but have installed the following perl bits and bobs but doing the normal perl Makefile.PL;make;make install.libwww-perl-5.805XML-NamespaceSupport-1.09XML-Simple-2.14XML-SAX-0.14

They have all been put into /Library/perl/5.8.6

I wonder what happened to them? Did iTunes 7 remove them when it upgraded? I have only ever tried Fetch art with iTunes 7.

It now runs without errors, it seems to look for stuff and lights flash very briefly on the ADSL modem but no artwork is ever returned.

Just like 'thetoydog' I am in New Zealand and there are no iTunes accounts for us due to unfeasibly mad copyright laws. Just listening to music is virtually an infringement since it involves a change of format.

I think your app is actually MORE needed now, because apple seems to have a MUCH more limited range of cover art than amazon does, and the new cover-art-search feature is only cool if you have the cover art!

Hey all. I've gotten lots of feedback (not just at this blog, but through email too) since the iTunes 7 release.

I am working to catch up with all correspondence, so please be patient.

My goals are to work to debug the increase in Perl errors that are getting reported as well as to evaluate the interest in continuing development. So far most people have asked me to continue development for various reasons, one of them being, that Apple's music store often doesn't find artwork for songs as well as Fetch Art.

I'm afraid this is not working at all for me on 10.4.7, althought the old version worked fine with 10.3 and itunes 6.I got rid of all signs of the old one.

It doesn't install into the scripts menu. If I drag it into the scripts folder, it won't open from the itunes menu. So I have to open it as a separate application.Then I get the same Perl error message as everyone else seems to.Then when I highlight some songs and open Fetch, the songs appear in the window, it says it is downloading, and then it just stops. If I eventually click on the fetchart window, I get the message NSContainerSpecifierError (2).

ya...ummm....I can't c my album covers on the new device I got with iTunes 7...it has this error message: iTunes is unable to browse album covers on this computer. Can you tell me wat 2 do on my blog?? It's ihellaluvbois.blogspot.com